First presented as part of a panel, Territory beyond Terra, with Phil Steinberg, Elaine Stratford and Kimberly Peters at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) 2015, Chicago

To speak of urbanizing the sea may conjure up images of the empty mansions dotting palm-shaped islands in Dubai, or the ongoing expansion of Monaco’s territory into the Ligurian Sea, or it may remind us of the pretensions of Nigeria’s new ‘Eko Atlantic’ project. It may also recall cartographies of resource extraction and circulation across the seabed: the ‘extended urbanization’ (Brenner/Lefebvre) using the ocean to wrap the planet with infrastructural continuity. It may also recall utopian projects of the 60’s in which floating cities were imagined as great interconnected web-like arks colonizing the ocean’s placid grey surface. While these imaginations are relevant, I would like to move beyond the immediacy such images impose, considering instead what it could mean to speak of the…